Passion, power and sex wrapped in fab music: see U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. I couldn’t disagree more with Mail & Guardian reviewer Khubu Meth (Friday, May 13), who finds it irrelevant to 21st-century South Africa. What could be more relevant to a country where a woman is murdered by her partner every six hours, than a story where the heroine is killed by her lover?
My friend in Mutare, Zimbabwe, writes me an e-mail: ”The roses are blooming in the garden, my German shepherd sleeps under the window and my young lover is back in my arms.” Sounds like bliss. They were together in 2000, split, and hitched up again this year. My friend is 53 and he is 33. How does tiny Mutare react to them?
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/ 9 February 2005
I saw a particular skirt at Woolworths when I moved to Pretoria in 2001. Late last year I saw it advertised as the latest fashion in Lusaka. My Zambian friends often gripe about near-expiration film dumped on them by South African retailers. Among the other expired products that South Africa proudly dumps beyond its borders are its older white executives, past their shelf life owing to black empowerment at home.
”I am chatting on the phone with a friend. I tell him I have met this cool man from Cape Verde. ‘Tsk tsk tsk,” he goes. ‘There you go, joining the multiple-partner risk-group for Aids.’ ‘Thank you, Dr Killjoy,’ say I. ‘On political grounds, I refuse to toe the line of the American religious right and George W Bush.”’ A single woman may only have sex twice a year but she’ll still be lumped with high risk.
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/ 7 December 2004
Most Africans know what to say about Aids — information campaigns have achieved this much. However, being designed in the capitals by Western-educated health experts and NGO staff, and funded by Western donors, these campaigns ignore traditional explanations of illness, prevention, healing and death embedded in the cultural matrix of many Africans.
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/ 20 September 2004
In the Nguni languages, an indlavini is a violent and reckless man who disrespects elders and tradition. The tough cities also produced the utsotsi, a street-wise petty criminal who asserts his masculinity through violence. Amplified by the media, such notions have now become entrenched. With the introduction of HIV into the social equation, their consequences are also deadlier than ever before.
It’s 1.30pm in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, on Friday. Traffic stops around the Old Mosque. Thousands fill the streets. When the muezzin calls, they kneel, bow and pray in perfect unison. The sermon dwells on how to avoid contracting HIV, and the fact that people who are infected with the virus must be helped, not shunned.
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/ 2 February 2001
STATE terrorism has escalated in Zimbabwe with Sunday’s bomb attack on the independent newspaper, the Daily News. Only the Zimbabwe Corps of Engineers and three Special Forces units could have access to the Chinese or Russian-made TM46 anti-tank landmines that destroyed the presses – and the technical expertise to carry out such a professional sabotage, […]
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/ 12 January 2001
Mercedes Sayagues reports from Bikita, where a by-election has turned the area into a battleground.